Shortly after launching what is now ChicagoTalks.org in 2006 Barbara Iverson realized that the project’s original vision of enlisting citizen journalists to cover neighborhood beats just wasn’t materializing. Originally pitched as a “meta-placelog” that would cover news in all fifty of the city’s wards the site received its initial funding from the school and through a grant from the start-up catalyst J-Lab. As part of the project then dubbed “Creating Community Connections” Iverson and co-founder Suzanne McBride an associate chair of the department set out to find people interested in writing the stories of their communities for the web.